Trump Wanted to Control Everything, but the Iran War Does Not Obey Him

One hundred days after the beginning of the war against Iran, the president still refuses to call it an endless war and still describes his February order as a brief excursion. But the man who built his career on dominance is running into his limits.

On Sunday, Donald Trump told the Financial Times that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would ultimately have no choice but to accept an agreement with Iran negotiated by the United States. I determine everything, he said. Early Monday morning, shortly after 5:30 a.m., the same man sat with his phone and wrote on social media that Israel and Iran needed to stop shooting immediately. Less than a day separated the sentence that claimed to control everything from the plea that everyone should please stop.

One hundred days earlier, on February 28, Trump had launched the American Israeli war against Iran. What he described in March as a brief excursion has now entered its fourth month, and the president finds himself trapped in exactly the kind of military dead end in the Middle East that haunted his predecessors and that he had promised to avoid. That same Sunday, he denied to Kristen Welker on NBC that he had ever made such a promise. He said he does not like these endless wars, but that this was not an endless war.

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He gained a brief pause on Monday when both Iran and Israel announced they would halt fire following their first direct strikes against one another since April. But the underlying stalemate remains. Hawks in Washington warn that the president faces a strategic defeat, and polling shows broad opposition to the war as the midterm elections draw closer.

Trump chose this war voluntarily, says Aaron David Miller, a former State Department official and now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He overestimated America’s military capabilities and underestimated Iran’s. That, he says, is a trap from which Trump currently cannot escape. Part of that trap is that Iran has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, while the American counter blockade of Iranian shipping has failed to change that reality. Added to this is Trump’s demand for far reaching concessions regarding Iran’s nuclear program, demands Tehran refuses to accept.

Trump has shown his frustration. Last week he complained on social media that his critics kept chirping that he should move faster or slower, go to war or not go to war, and so on. They should sit back and relax, because in the end everything would work out, it always does. Look at Iraq, he told Welker, America had been there for years, here it had only been a few months, and the danger was largely over and would soon disappear entirely. Yet unlike Iraq, where American ground forces overthrew Saddam Hussein’s government within weeks before becoming trapped in a years long insurgency, the war against Iran has primarily revealed how quickly American firepower reaches its limits.

If the war leaves Iran’s leadership angrier and further armed, says Brad Bowman, a former Army officer and now a senior military expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington institute known for its hard line position against Iran, and additionally with greater influence over the Strait of Hormuz, then that would be a bad outcome for the United States. America has shown that it possesses the strongest military in the world, but even that military has limits, and he fears the administration underestimated the Islamic Republic of Iran. A sharp escalation would be equally dangerous, he says, because the shrinking American stockpile of ammunition has already weakened the country’s position in Europe and Asia. His preferred path, economic and political pressure on Tehran, would be difficult for Trump to sustain because Iran can keep gasoline prices elevated through its grip on the strait. Bowman says he worries the president will ultimately settle for a bad agreement.

What further complicates Trump’s effort to direct the course of the war is his unpredictable relationship with Netanyahu, who angered the president through heavy strikes in Lebanon in his campaign against Hezbollah, the Iranian allied militia there. Trump admitted last week that he had a profanity filled phone call with Netanyahu and said he had been a little upset by Netanyahu’s constant fighting in Lebanon. It is a remarkably small phrase for a war, a little upset. Regarding Netanyahu, says Miller, whose State Department work focused on the Middle East, Trump has largely succeeded in creating leverage because the backing of the American president remains decisive for Netanyahu’s political survival in Israel. If necessary to reach an agreement with Iran, Trump will likely increase that pressure further. But to do that he would also need to force additional concessions from Tehran. Trump has shown that he can alter Israel’s calculations, Miller says. That he can alter Tehran’s calculations remains unproven, and that is his great problem.

Here lies what this man does not understand. You can say that you control everything, and it changes nothing about what actually happens. Force can destroy, it can tear down houses and strike facilities, but it cannot compel another will to say yes. A strait closed by a smaller country does not reopen because the larger one commands it, and an opponent determined to resist does not yield simply to declarations of strength. The president who built his career on being master of every situation started a war believing that this one too would bend to his will, and now day after day he collides with the one limit that cannot be argued away, reality itself. It will work out in the end, he says, it always does. It is the sentence of a gambler who still believes he has never truly lost and does not notice that the table at which he now sits is a different one.